My 聲tonia - Softcover

Cather, Willa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1517288061 ISBN 13: 9781517288068

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
--- Willa Cather, My 聲tonia

My 聲tonia
Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)

My 聲tonia tells the stories of several immigrant families who move out to rural Nebraska to start new lives in America, with a particular focus on a Bohemian family, the Shimerdas, whose eldest daughter is named 聲tonia. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, arrives in the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, on the same train as the Shimerdas, as he goes to live with his grandparents after his parents have died. Jim develops strong feelings for 聲tonia, something between a crush and a filial bond, and the reader views 聲tonia’s life, including its attendant struggles and triumphs, through that lens.

Reception and literary significance

My 聲tonia was enthusiastically received in 1918 when it was first published. It was considered a masterpiece and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. Today, it is considered as her first masterpiece. Cather was praised for bringing the American West to life and making it personally interesting. It brought place forward almost as if it were one of the characters, while at the same time playing upon the universality of the emotions, which in turn promoted regional American literature as a valid part of mainstream literature.

While interpretations vary, My 聲tonia is clearly an elegy to those families who built new lives west of the Mississippi River and highlights the role of women pioneers in particular.

Cather also makes a number of comments concerning her views on women's rights and there are many disguised sexual metaphors in the text.

My 聲tonia is a selection of The Big Read, the community-wide reading program of The National Endowment for the Arts.

About this title

Review

It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My 聲tonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of 聲tonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of 聲tonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

聲tonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My 聲tonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak

From the Publisher

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Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1517288061
• ISBN 13: 9781517288068
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 110